Pages 34 to 39 – A series
of flowcharts used for describing the events in a characters life before play

Page 40 – Tasks and Skills
Splash Page (Section 4)

Pages 41 to 43 –
Descriptions of the base mechanisms and how skills work

Page 44 – A list of skills
categorised by Role

Page 45 – Master skill
list (categorised by relevant attribute)

Pages 46 to most of 53 –
Detailed listing of the skills and what they do

The rest of 53 through to
55 – Experience system for improving skills, creating new skills and a system
for reputation (I don’t remember seeing the reputation system before this
analysis, and certainly never saw it in use)

Page 56 – Weapons, Armour,
Gear Splash Page (Section 5)

Page 57 to the top of 58 –
Overview of items in the setting

Bottom of 58 – Standard
income for roles based on their specific skill

Page 59 – Are you
employed? And some simple encumbrance rules

Page 60 – How weapon
statistics work

Page 61 – Table of weapons

Pages 62 to 66 – Weapon
statistics and images

Page 67 – Body Armour

Page 68 – Table of other
equipment

Pages 69 to 71 –
Descriptions of other equipment

Page 72 – Cyberware Half
Splash Page (Section 6)

Other half of page 72 to
75 – Effects of cyberware on fashion, society and soul

Pages 76 to 79 – Table of
cyberware

Pages 80 to half of 93 –
Descriptions of cyberware

The rest of page 93 to 94
– Ways to earn extra money to pay for cyberware

Pages 251 to 254 – A
compilation of the character sheets scattered through the book.

(Note that the numbering
starting with 00 and 0 to complete the 256 pages)

Total page count – 256

Table of Contents – Yes

Index – No
(not even a quick find table, but the table of contents is very comprehensive)

Steps to create a character – An introductory overview of the classes for new
players, then eleven pages of basic rules spread over two sections, followed by
a separate section for skills, then equipment, and most characters will need to
reference the cyberware or net sections of the book (possibly both). These are
scattered throughout the book.

The way skills work – Three pages

The way combat works – Seventeen pages (sixteen for personal combat, and one for combat in
vehicles)

World setting
– Generally Thirty-three pages (split over four sections; two at the start,
seven in the timeline/background, nine in megacorporations and fifteen in the
Night City section). Plus an extra four pages generally describing the Net.

What do the characters do? – Each of the classes has a basic description of
their day to day lives (and the money they earn through this), but nothing
specifies whether this game is about their daily lives or the events that
happen behind the scenes. Characters are preloaded with a bunch of background
information and issues that might need to be resolved; I guess this is a good
start.

What do the players do? – Nothing specific, not even the common “What is a
roleplaying game?” section found in many games of the era.

What does the GM do? – Thirty-four pages (split over three sections: four pages on running
the game, a sample game to give the GM ideas, then screamsheets as further idea
prompts).

For years I had only seen
fantasy games, my eyes were opened to the greater potential of RPGs when I
started seeing modern and sci-fi settings creep into the hobby. I had seen “Dark
Conspiracies” on the lone spinning rack of RPGs in the corner of a toy store
near y home, but the first non-fantasy game I played was “TMNT and Other Strangeness”,
since TMNT used basically the same system as D&D it felt like more of the
same but with a fun new surface gloss. Cyberpunk was the second “sci-fi” game I
played and it used a very different system.

In retrospect, Cyberpunk
2020 seems to have been one of those games that was struggling to do something
more than just throw characters into a sequence of combat scenarios. It fed
from the ethos of “Style over substance”, giving us numerous ways to look cool
with gadgets, implants and cosmetic surgery (many of the sourcebooks took this
even further), but it also started to integrate the characters into their
community (through the lifepath tool).

The two biggest chunks of
the book (and most well-worn as I flick through it), are the combat section and
the net section. These are obviously the sections that saw the most use when
the book was mine and when it belonged to a friend before me. Not far behind
them in size and usage are the character generation and cyberware sections.

Like RIFTS, and many other
games of the era, it was a toolkit designed to provide you with everything
necessary to run a variety of games, in this case they stretched from combat,
to virtual reality infiltration, and corporate espionage. That’s basically the
trinity of the cyberpunk setting, so it makes sense that the game would focus
on these three. Everything else in the game is basically about looking good
while you do these things (with the reputation system reflecting the fallout
from missions, and the medical section reflecting the fallout from combat).

It covers the setting, it
covers the way things are done, but it only barely touches on why you’d want to
do things in the setting. The simple answer for the time was probably “because
it’s cool, and you can look cool doing it”, we have cool weapons and cool
cyberware with cool sounding names. You just want to use it somehow, and the GM
just gives you excuses to do so (while offering you some money so that you can
buy new cool stuff).

There’s nothing much in
the way of drama or social interaction (some of the skills touch on this, and
some of the lifepath results hint at ways that social complexity can be brought
into the stories), but if you just want a shoot-em-up with high tech gadgets in
a glass-and-steel metropolis, then why bother with all that melodrama. For the
time, the combat system was pretty streamlined, roll to hit, and if you hit
then roll for damage (reduce damage by armour); the combat system even manage
to vaguely fit the same system as the skills.

The book was basically
laid out in a coherent order. Especially with the early chapters and their
splash pages on the even page count (this means the early chapters open with a
two page spread with an image on the left, while the title and starting text
begin on the right). This starts to get a bit more erratic toward the end of the
book, arguably making the tail end of the book seem a bit rushed and not as
well considered as the earlier parts of the book. As an example, the drugs
section doesn’t have a splash page, and it’s not as fleshed out as many other sections
of the book. If feels like an addendum to the medical section just before it (and
probably should have been left as such).

All in all, I can see steps being made in the hobby at this time, there were lessons being learnt, but there was still a long way to go when it came to user friendliness in RPGs.

Blog Note

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